It’s Time (magazine) to Respect Cows

Animal minds made big news this month with Time magazine dedicating its cover story to the topic. "Inside the minds of animals," by Jeffrey Kluger, provides an engaging glimpse into some of the exciting recent discoveries in animal cognition. That title is an improvement over that of a February 2006 Scientific American article which asked meekly, "Do Animals Have Feelings?" as if there should remain any doubt about that.

Kluger appears to have had an epiphany when he contrasts how sentient animals really are to the indefensible way humans have treated and continue to treat them, especially farmed animals. He emphasizes that the boundaries separating human and non-human animals are disintegrating. Time magazine, through him, has taken a bold public step in saying that "we could surely eat less meat." I hope this generates considerable angst among its readers and advertisers alike.

Kluger repeats the common prejudice that herd animals exhibit little intelligence. Intelligence aligns poorly with sentience, so even if deer and horses and giraffes were less smart than other creatures, it wouldn't follow that they can suffer less or feel pain less acutely. Further into Kluger's article, the Harvard University ethologist Marc Hauser is quoted as saying that "animals have a myopic intelligence; they never experience the aha moment that a 2-year-old child gets." While one can sympathize with Hauser for the turmoil currently surrounding his research methods, I can't sympathize with a statement like that. Tellingly, a study on herd animals puts the lie to both Kluger's claim of their lack of intelligence and Hauser's claim of human uniqueness. A 2004 Cambridge University experiment showed that young heifers exhibit behavioral expressions of excitement when they solve a problem. At critical points in their learning curve in a task that required pressing their nose against a panel to open a gate for access to food, the heifers showed behavioral signs of excitement (jumping, bucking, or kicking), and the animals' heart rates rose. A second group of heifers whose access to food was provided independently of their panel presses showed no such behaviors. This study suggests that cows-and probably many other animals-can have "eureka" moments, taking pleasure in their own learning achievements.

Pressing a panel to get food may not seem like such an astonishing bovine act to us now, but it wasn't long ago when scientists gauged ape smarts by comparable feats. Perhaps it's time to form a counterpart to the Great Ape Trust that focuses on bovine consciousness and intelligence. After all, corvids (crows, jays, ravens, magpies, etc.) have leapfrogged social carnivores in Kluger's smartness continuum. Who would have expected birdbrains to do that?

By expanding our awareness of animals' feelings, we are gradually being forced to acknowledge that a new relationship to them is needed. Lawmakers in the Spanish region of Catalonia recognize that. In July they voted to ban bullfighting. Following heated debate, the 135-seat legislature ruled 68 to 55 (nine abstentions) for the ban. If cattle could read headlines, there would have been some more jumping in the air that day. Olé!

The "ah-hah" moment you describe of a cow who's frustrated at not being able to get at a piece of food, and the subsequent release of tension said cow feels when finding the solution to its problem, is not remotely connected to the "ah-hah" moment that Marc Hauser was talking about.

While this is a blog, not a scientific paper, I find it ironic that you're engaging in the exact same activity (misrepresenting data) that got Hauser into hot water.

Wow! Where to start?
I suppose we have to address the myth that we were put here by some supreme being and given dominion over our planet and all the life upon it.Until we stop teaching myth or faith as science and come to understand as a species that we are dependent on just about every plant and animal on the planet for our survival we will continue to have these debates. Do animals understand everything we say, of course not, do our domestic animals understand some of what we say? I believe in a limited fashion that some of them do understand what we say to them. I haven't any proof of this other than my experience with my own animal companions over the years.
This week I must end the life of the son I didn't have, my fifteen year old Border Collie Chase. Chase has bad arthritis and Doggy Alzheimers and more often than not he doesn't recognize me. I probably should have done this sooner but I couldn't be sure that he didn't look forward to every day that he has left or each afternoon when we come home from work. This isn't science this is love for those who give us love unconditionally.
When we learn to treat the planet and every other form of life on it with respect we may survive as a species, until then it's all down hill.

Im sorry for the hard time you are going through. The silver lining if we can find it I think is a softened heart to animals and an experience that makes animal intelligence and feelings undeniable, I hope you take this time (if you haven't already) to extend your care and respect to more animals particularly the ones that society disregards as only being worth the 'meat' on their bones. if you want any advice on how to do this mercy for animals will send free information there are also many fb pages like trying vegan dedicated to helping :)

I will never be in the same galaxy, never mind the same ballpark of the aha moments of Einstein, Mozart, Shakespeare or daVinci. A Stradivarius in my hands is nothing more than a very expensive piece of wood that goes “ping, ping” when I pull its strings. But that does not mean that I do not take pleasure in my learning moments, my eurekas. It also does not mean that I should be treated with cruelty or deprived of my life because my aha moments do not fit others’ expectations.

Some of my aha moments have even been so basic as the simple joy, and yes - the release of tension - when I have figured out the buttons on the new remote!

Lee Charles Kelly has every right to question the rigor of my assertions, but I do resent his charge that I am lying. Lying implies deliberate intent to present something that I know to be untrue. I don't do that, ever. Do I sometimes risk ascribing to animals more intelligence or awareness than they are actually evincing? Yes. Similarly, LCK risks ascribing less to animals than they are actually capable of. For example, he is among those who believe that, lacking our language, other species are capable of only simple cognitive feats. He also seems to think that nonhumans have no theory of mind (awareness of the awareness of another), as when he claims there is no evidence that animals act sneaky if they thinking no-one is watching. Chimpanzees do this. One example is when a subordinate male chimpanzee keeps a wary eye on a dominant male while he and a female sneak behind a boulder to copulate where the dominant can't see them. Various other forms of theory of mind have been demonstrated in other species. Rats show metacognition, and elephants, dolphins, great apes and magpies have all passed mirror self-recognition tests.

Kelly is also wrong in suggesting that I want us to believe that animals are “just like us.” Not so. Rather, I want us to be aware that they are acutely sentient, that they have lives worth living, and that this information needs to inform a new way of relating to them. Kelly is right that I want people to stop eating meat, because meat consumption is the source of more anthropogenic animal suffering than any other human activity. To that end, I hope that Kelly is also a vegetarian, otherwise his claim rings hollow that we both share a desire to prevent animal suffering.

that's a sad mind set to have, all opinions should be open to change with new information. surely we cannot teach empathy, you develop it or you don't know one can make you. so just as there will always be racists because as long as people look different there will be prejudice or any other such behavior based off of a lack of empathy for those different then yourselves. Still I hope that if you are reading scientific articles perhaps if not for empathy for animals then perhaps concern for the planet (check out UN studies on agriculture and climate change) will eventually bring you around. best wishes.